Please note that even if a past club book isn’t designated as being actively read, you can still go back to those threads and post thoughts/comments/questions in them!
For the official Book Club suggestion thread, where you can poll potential readers on their interest in a brand-new club (or see if the idea’s been tossed around before), please visit this thread: Book Club Suggestions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a book club?
Book clubs are where people read books together! Typically, the process goes like this:
People nominate books to read (nomination rules will differ depending on the club)
After a certain number of nominations are collected, or the current book club read is nearing completion, or some other club-determined factor, voting is opened for interested participants to choose which book the club should read next. Voters are typically given multiple votes to use on their favorites among the nominations.
After a pre-determined amount of time, the poll closes, and the next book is picked!
A home thread is created, which will serve as the hub of discussion for that particular pick and how the club will be run around that particular book. A schedule for reading the book is decided on, and updates on the club’s progress or other questions and answers are also hosted here.
Depending on how long the book is, how long the club for that book will run, and how many anticipated participants there are, the person running the club can choose to have each week’s reading split off into it’s own thread (all of which are then catalogued in the home thread) or keep all discussion for all weeks in the home thread itself.
Once the current read finishes, the process starts again!
What's the difference between a formal and informal club?
The line between these two can be rather fuzzy! Here are some general guidelines you can use to distinguish the two, but keep in mind it can depend on what the club considers itself, how the club activities change, evolving community standards for classification, etc.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much, to be honest; declaring your club is one or the other is not essential or needed at all to start your own club. The terms are used here as a general way for those keeping track of clubs to have some sort of internal system of organization, but the book club police will not be called on anyone if you say one thing and it’s marked as something different here!
Is the club organized around one specific theme, genre, author, series, etc.? → Probably a formal club.
Does the club stick to a rigid and formally-voted on reading schedule? → Probably a formal club.
Is the club a one-off group of people interested in reading one specific book with no plans to formally vote on another one after? → Probably an informal club.
Is all of the book reading discussion hosted in one home thread? → Used to be this was more of an indicator of an informal club, but recent book club threads organized in a more “formal” fashion have started to host discussion in one thread, so now it depends.
TOC Legend: : currently reading/planning to read a book : not currently reading/planning to read a book : this section is “full”. Please add future books to the next relevant section.
Book Club Lists Legend: - An offshoot club for a particular book (usually to continue reading the series past the initially-voted # of volumes) has been created. If no link on the seedling icon, see the book’s home thread.
Suggestions for formatting, categorizing and other feedback welcome. As stated in title is a Work in progress.
It could probably resemble more to what @seanblue did over at WaniKani, but the idea in including the natively cards is that (it should?) update the level automatically.
The thread itself is a Wiki, so it should allow for editions.
Maybe also a pin along the category introduction would be useful @brandon ?
Unfortunately, Discourse caches that information which it gets from the meta tags… so it won’t update very frequently. I think the cache is pretty long but still the best we can do
If it helps at all, the mystery club has a list of past clubs linked in the home thread here. Since it’s a paragraph header it can be linked to directly.
I added the レベル７ informal club; it needs to go in it’s own table, but I abstained for the moment since I’m on mobile and it’d end up being a mess. Same for last December’s advent club.
No problem! I can remove it. I dunno if we need a separate thread at this point for non-JP bookclubs; they’re not going to happen too regularly atm I would think.
That makes sense to me when it’s a definite “our participants are only reading in this one language”, but like with 本好き for example, it’s a dual-language club. Maybe three separate sections? JP, KR (whenever those pop up) and Multilanguage?
learnnatively Book Clubs.
- An offshoot club for a particular book (usually to continue reading the series past the initially-voted # of volumes) has been created. If no link on the seedling icon, see the book’s home thread.
